Local players going global in digital advertisement

In every industry in every country where industry matures, local firms can go global. The Turkish digital advertisement market is no exception to this phenomenon. Up until a few years ago, there were no global players in the Turkish market and there were no Turkish firms competing for global markets. The digitalization of advertisement is happening faster than anyone could anticipate, however.

According to a declaration of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Turkey office, digital advertising investment in Turkey experienced a growth of 24 percent in 2013, with a total value of 1.17 billion Turkish Liras. These figures show digital investments bear a 20 percent share of total media investments, earning the position of the second largest medium among total media advertisement revenue.

Global players such as Social Bakers, Carat and OMD have entered the market as it matured. Social Bakers provided the statistics and the others provided the buying service. Meanwhile, local firms such as adnboost emerged as strong competitors, and now they are eyeing global media shares.

The most promising of these types of start-ups is adsuit. Adsuit is an Istanbul start-up that aims to change the game for advertisers that care about audience data by providing a self-service, transparent advertising platform. The founders have strong backgrounds in media planning and buying, finance, marketing, PR and sales.

Ahmet Arslan, adsuit co-founder, is confident that the platform will provide better results at lower costs by leveraging the pricing transparency approach for advertisers. “We are starting to integrate native ads and video ads technology into the adsuit re-targeting framework,” says Gülseren Arslan, also a co-founder.

Adsuit will launch new plug-ins and features for e-commerce advertisers, publishers and CRM tools, to unlock audience data for cross-device targeting.

I have been writing that innovation is about people. If you have the right people, at the right time and at the right business atmosphere, amazing things can happen.

Gülseren is an amazing personality; her creativity is demonstrated simply by the dresses that she wears, many of which are her own designs. Her laptop bag, made out of spare computer parts, is legendary.

So she was the right person. The business in general is booming still, so it was the right time.

One thing that I got wrong relates to the general atmosphere of the country. I thought that for innovation and success, we needed a more tolerant society. Arslan proved me wrong by being successful in this political climate.

I still believe, however, that in a more flexible society we would have many more entrepreneurs—and that’s what Turkey needs, not more ugly buildings.